GREG HABERNY
Image courtesy of the gallery
Marisa Sage
Owner/Director
Like the Spice Gallery
224 Roebling Street
Brooklyn, NY 11211
718.388.5388
www.likethespice.com
Sometimes you see a ROA piece and it looks like a real animal that might peel off the wall and come over and stomp on your head. Or chomp off an ear. Chomp chomp chomp.
Kriebel! That’s his name; Our fearless videographer on the scene – Video shot like a wild animal itself has a camera strapped on it’s head, hurriedly and harriedly running through the jungle with un-glued urgency, freezing in place to stare at the giant-ish pig and huge pecking bird and many other creatures in the berserk brush-filled back lots of abandonment.
It is a bit long for my short attention span, and eventually the scariness of the bouncing video becomes more comic than creepy. It’s wayyyyyyy beautiful.
Thanks to the fine and furry Charley Uzzell Edwards, accidental gallerist of PURE EVIL, who have somehow managed to coax ROA in for a show that starts Thursday.
Did I mention ROA’s coming to BROOKLYN NEXT MONTH?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> press release
The cities were once our pastures, fish once jumped from the rivers, storks once combed these streets. And that’s easy to forget — which is why the work of Graffiti artist ROA can be so powerful, existing in ruined, deserted industrial spaces of the city.
R O A
Solo Exhibition at Pure Evil Gallery 8th APRIL – 2nd MAY 2010
ROA’s eagerly anticipated UK solo debut opens in London this spring to exhibit his unique portrayal of large scale urban wildlife, disquietly cohabiting city streets, hand painted in his distinctive black and white style.
ROA started painting abandoned buildings and warehouses in the isolated industrial outskirts of his hometown – Ghent, Belgium. Fixating on the animals he found there; the wildlife became the central subject matter of his work, inspired by their clever ability to adapt into scavengers in order to survive. He used the dilapidated, coarse interiors and exteriors of the unyielding landscape as a canvas to portray his large-scale creatures.
Roa filled a vast abandoned warehouse complex of different chambers and exteriors with a menagerie of large-scale animals, creating an impressive spray painted zoo of city scavengers.
His obsession went global when he took to the streets of New York, London, Berlin, Warsaw and Paris, prolifically painting his trademark cross sectioned animals wherever he went, locating them where they naturally invade the main city streets with their quiet yet powerful presence.
Pure Evil Gallery is proud and extremely excited to present a new body of original artwork by ROA this spring, complete with street works in the local area. Look out for a new ROA city fox appearing on a street near you.
MIMI THE CLOWN
Bonjour les amis !
Ce mail pour vous informer d’une exposition qui se profile à l’horizon !
“REGARDS URBAINS”, du 23 avril au 29 mai (vernissage le 22 à 18h30)
4 parvis st Maurice à LILLE (à 100m de la gare Lille Flandres / à 1h de Paris)
MIMI the Clown, Janusz STEGA, Benoit PIRET et Freddy PANNECOCKE livrent ici leurs interprétations respectives de la Ville dans leurs actes de création dans une exposition unique qui trouve son site sur plus de 1000m2 en coeur de ville.
+ d’infos sur http://www.vertikall.com/
A très bientôt !!
Street Artist Billi Kid, known for poppy portraits of pink cadillacs and jetson era convertibles with his friends and artists at the wheel, George Bush as a WMD swinging cowboy, Sarah Palin as a bikini-clad NRA bimbo, and Jim Morrison doing his own special Easter tribute on a cross – graciously donated this cowboy in profile to the auction on the 24th.
Our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring clown, Various & Gould, Poster Boy, El Sol 25, Yote, Imminent Disaster, Jaime Rojo
One basis for “beef” on the street is another artist “biting” your style. But enthusiastic Thierry Guetta proved to be such a good student that he’s nearly made an art out of it.
The danger presented by “Exit Through the Giftshop”, opening April 16th in New York, is not that Shepard Fairey and Banksy discovered too late for their comfort that a trusted acolyte and “documentarian” eventually imitated their aesthetic approaches successfully, but that he studied their marketing manuals too.
“Exit” is a blast – and not just for those considering themselves insiders because they caught the Street Art Train just as it pulled away from all previous definitions of urban/graff/public/fine art. This hilarious high-speed romp knows how to keep the storyline infused with new oxygen with each twist of plot, with players swapping in and out of the frame to illustrate points, and locations jarringly jabbing throughout with a Blair Witch finesse for nausea. In the end it appears that no animals were harmed. But few in the “Street Art” world will be able to say the same.
For the fans, many of the names (and some of the faces) you know are all in here, a scatter-shot list dictated by Guerra’s dedicated following of the secretive and shadowy urban art trail: a lot of Banksy and Fairey, and slices of Invader, Zeus, Swoon, Neckface, Borf, Dan Witz, Sweet Toof, Faile, Ron English, among others. Other players like Steve Lazarides and Roger Gastman help us to ground the machinations in the context of the chaotic developments. Darth Vader, I mean Banksy, slopes in the shadows dropping dollops of witticism like so many blobs of paint and comes off more haunted than haunting.
Banksy clearly says at one point, “It’s not about the hype. It’s not about the money,” but most viewers will feel a twinge of incredulity at the statement, however heartfelt in that moment. Any artist who goes to such lengths to insure anonymity and stage installation stunts that top the previous ones may have calculated a wee bit of the old evil hype into the equation. The story as presented shows how hype for it’s own sake can become unhinged entirely from it’s core mission, clone itself at a rapacious pace and unwieldy velocity, and finally stand by itself as an art.
It’s too easy to flatten the layers of the actors in this post-post-post modern play, and lazy. It’s not just a story of two street artists unwittingly training their competition while enjoying the company of a one-man glee club with one hand on the ladder and a roving eye. Instead a documentary of this complexity may stand as a jittery cautionary tale, a dramatic foreshadowing of a world of de-contextualized images, recombined and employed with a sharp hand for any purpose anywhere. It’s not the first time that imagery has been appropriated and re-engineered – it’s just the ease of use and wonderful availability of it all. As one of MBW’s graphic artists explained about the process of creating new works for him to give up or down thumbs, “We scan the pictures and use Photoshop”. Hopefully increased cultural literacy of these technological truths will prepare us to deal with future mash-ups of things we once considered institutions.
Guetta is at times depicted as a loyal fan, an insatiable documentarian, an unsteady hand, a loving family man, and an immensely driven director of his career. For the measured hand-wringing Fairey and Banksy express about their association with the elephant in the living room that eventually emulated them, each of them is too smart not to have seen it coming, and they seem to delight in the waves he has made. While reflecting on his own tumultuous path through the street art world as it continued to explode around him, the filmmaker, street artist, and man behind the moniker MBW says, “I don’t know how to play chess, but my life is a chess game”. Check!
“Exit Through the Gift Shop” comes to the US April 16.
Sunshine, NY 16-Apr
Lincoln Plaza, NY 16-Apr
The Landmark, LA 16-Apr
Arclight, Hollywood 16-Apr
Embarcadero, SF 16-Apr
Shattuck, Berkeley 16-Apr
Rafael, San Rafael 16-Apr
Aquarius, Palo Alto 16-Apr
Ritz 5, Philadelphia 23-Apr
Century, Chicago 23-Apr
Harvard Exit, Seattle 23-Apr
Kendall Square, Boston 23-Apr
Lagoon, Minneapolis 30-Apr
E Street, Washington, DC 30-Apr
Harbor, Baltimore 30-Apr
Midtown Art, Atlanta 30-Apr
Mayan, Denver 30-Apr
Hillcrest, SD 30-Apr
Main/Maple Art, Detroit 7-May
River Oaks, Houston 7-May
Angelika, Dallas 7-May
Downer, Milwaukee 7-May
Avon, Providence 7-May
Plaza Frontenac, St. Louis 14-May
Now that Passover is Over….
It’s back to painting for Israel’s Tant and Unga of the “Broken Fingaz Crew”. Points for use of FIRE incredibly effectively (don’t try this at home unless there is an adult around, kiddies), and the muzak.
You may have seen his boards bolted here and there, combining historical portraiture and sometimes verse to accompany it – a page ripped from a never-time; something genuine mixed with a camp sensibility. In recent explorations Gore B begins with Audubon-style bird paintings and mixes fonts with them, each taking off with a story in it’s own direction.
For more about the Silent Auction Benefit on April 24 read HERE
Just got in this beauty from Logan Hicks to help out with our benefit. It’s a nice serigraph of an apartment complex in Queens, New York.
For more about the Silent Auction Benefit on April 24 read HERE
Minneapolis Represents! Broken Crow New Prints with Burlesque Printers
The new print series is called “Housing Crisis” – Hell I’d definitely agree. Not only does this title point to the bank-created horror that is sweeping our land, but it references the ongoing theme Broken Crow has about the natural world’s schism with the man-made environment.
Recently Broken Crow visited Austin during SXSW…
The Stencil Top 5 as picked by Samantha Longhi of StencilHistoryX
Funky Red Dog
Penny
Trappeniers
Senior X
Jerm IX
March Madness is on the Streets of New York City. Here is the proof!
Time to Play: Can you spot the differences? Williamsburg gets a Nip-N-Tuck.
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BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
